Friday, August 17, 2012

Thank you Facebook

Despite the annoying content on Facebook, despite the privacy setting issues, and despite all the negative reputation of what is Facebook, i say Thank You. A big Thank You.

What i'm grateful for FB, is by bringing everyone online. EVERYONE. Now everyone can get their news, in a super fast, unmoderated medium.

And everyone can make a choice. Pro-RH, anti-RH, dontgiveashit-RH, makefunof-RH, and iwouldratherplayD3-RH, everyone can make a choice (though in psychology we learned we don't really have a choice, but that's for another story).

I know the Internet came first. But before FB, it was hard to bring everyone to the same discussion forum. Now, anyone can post news, can be organic news, or from a blogpost or from the mass media companies. And the social connections quickly picks it up and spread it. And the pick-up and spread is so efficient and organic, that any significant news will spread on its own merit, and not based on decision by some media executive or some political backing.

Of course, there is fear about spreading lies, but these lies are quickly examined in the comments and shares. From there, it will be easy for anyone to dig deeper and make up their own truths. Any truth is also easily questioned, reviewed and verified. After all, we know truth is a personal decision of what we accept as true or not.

Of course it's not perfect. The entire global population is not present yet. There is disinformation and spam. A lot are still coming from the TV generation (passive and mindless). But i'm also not sure if we want it to be perfect.

Some news that has real merit might not spread as fast and as wide than a non-sense one. But to me that's ok, it just means that the other news is more sticky to people. If a news don't spread wide then try again, until you get to the tipping point.

These are exciting times we live in. And as more and more of us come online in FB (or Twitter or G+ or reddit or 4chan or other social media networks), specially the next generation (Justin Bieber and Call Me Maybe fans), it will only become better and more interesting. There will be a lot of noise in these social networks, but overtime as we all do, we will slowly learn how to filter them.

I'm saying this to FB, but this is in theory goes out to all the social networks and the Internet as a whole, specially the blogs and the bloggers out there.

To some of us, this is not old news. Clay Shirky has made books and a TED talk about this. Former US VP Pres. Al Gore even had a speech about this at least a decade ago. The Arab uprising has used this extensively in their own campaign. The Dot Com Bubble had its own sugar rush moment and bonked in the late 90s about this. And the list goes on.

But seeing it work and seeing it cut through some of the hardest and toughest institutions of our time, religion and mass media, is just, just worth mentioning. And seeing it happening in our own backyard, is very inspiring.

Now we know that Senators and politicians and religious leaders and media celebrities and anybody for that matter, can not easily bullshit us anymore. We know and they know, they're just full of BS.